


Powerful Dark and Powerful Light

by Asher_2179



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Force Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 09:44:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13144041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asher_2179/pseuds/Asher_2179
Summary: Rey is both dark and light





	Powerful Dark and Powerful Light

“ _Breathe_ ," he tells her, pushing her hand into the rock next to her crossed legs. She does, and it happens so quickly from there, so much faster than he ever remembers it being for him.

 _Life, death, balance, an energy_ , she breathes.

He nods, giving gentle encouragements.

_Yes. But it’s so much bigger._

She begins to race ahead, where he can’t follow, and he tries to calm her, to slow her down, to push her to just _feel_ , to _be_ , just for a moment longer. But she is too fast, too curious. She goes looking, following voices which take her away from him, and she falls straight into it, straight to the darkness. Her brows draw together and her body jolts with immediate tension, muscles pulling tight. He watches in disbelief as the rock she sits on groans and cracks, a slithering snake that shudders out beneath his boots. The air around them lights up, buzzing and alive, like the electricity in the air before a storm. He tries calling her back, yelling her name, but she pushes forward, chasing chasing _chasing_.

When she does come back, she is gasping for air, ashen faced and sweaty, and his heart is hammering in his chest in a way it hasn’t in more years than he cares to count.

 

**

 

He is shocked to discover her that night, with Ben Solo’s presence so strong next to her he could reach out and touch it himself. The two of them are close, fingertips kissing, and he blacks out.

He _sees_ the darkness in her when she comes at him afterwards, demanding to know the truth.

Darkness and anger and a tinge of hate brought about by hurt.

Her voice is whip sharp, and he turns, trying to walk away and diffuse the situation.

He doesn’t expect the knock to his back. He _certainly_ doesn’t expect her to hit him so _hard_.

He _feels_ blackness, in her movements, strong and sure and lightening fast. Moonlight bounces off the sharp edges of her cheekbones and she looks beautiful and terrible at once, muscles straining as her features twist into an anguished scowl. He fights her off as best he can, but he is out of practice.

Shaken.

She easily bests him.

The darkness radiates off her when she draws her lightsaber, _his_ lightsaber, and for a terrifying moment he waits for her to swing it down, for the burn of it to sing as it singes his skin and muscle and bone.

But as fast as anger overtakes her ... it subsides. Her features relax, and instead of that terrible anger, there is now only hurt.

Hurt, and disappointment, in him.

 _That_ is something he can deal with, however.

That is something he _knows_ , intimately so, because it swims through his veins every day.

 

**

 

For all her darkness, her quick to anger rage and her stubborn desire to follow that shadow that lurks beneath her, she is light in equal measure.

In certain moments in shines out of her like the sun bouncing off the sea.

There is an innocence, a purity to her, that makes him pause and wonder. For all the hardships she had endured in her short life, from her scrappy formative years through to the atrocities she had witnessed just mere weeks prior, she still remains inherently good.

She _believes_.

She _hopes_.

When he tells her about that night for the first time, the darkest night of his life, she stares at him ready to learn. Ready to hear as he tears apart that newfound hope and belief of hers. He hates himself as he does it, knowing he is omitting a crucial detail.

(He can’t bring himself to tell her, despite his best intentions to do so).

But she responds with that same fire, that same steadfast trust in him, a misguided projection of her unfailing hope.

“You didn’t fail Kylo, Kylo failed you.”

Her face is strong, and earnest, and true. He almost believes her.

 _Almost_.

“I won’t,” she adds.

When he goes to sleep that night his stomach churns and churns like the angry sea.

 

**

 

He watches her, one day, while descending the stairs on a particularly wet afternoon. He sees her, and something makes him stop. He presses against the rocks, out of her immediate line of sight.

She is standing under the Falcon, face upturned to the constant drizzle. She leans out, catches a trickle of water running off the undercarriage, letting it cup in her hand and fall through her fingers.

She is smiling.

This girl is a desert child, just like he had been, and she was likely seeing rain for the first time.

He remembers the type of rain he had seen on Tatooine. He could count the number of times it rained there on one hand, if you counted those times as rain, at all. Just fat, bloated drops that fell in scattered patterns from the sky, with no particular rhythm or reason. They would often evaporate as soon as they hit the sand.

Something in her childlike wonder at the rain, an annoyance he now dismisses as an everyday occurrence, gets at him.

It’s a small thing, but it pulls at his chest all the same.

 

**

 

He sits, crossed legged on that rock, high on the island’s peak. The suns will be setting soon, beginning their descent below the horizon, and he steadies himself, slowing his breathing, sharpening his senses.

As his eyes close, he keeps his prosthetic hand resting on his knee, and his flesh and blood hand flat on the rock, fingers gently tracing the jagged edges of the crack she had left behind.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never written from Luke’s perspective before .. or really anything about him in the SW verse (Cassian is my go to) so I hope he isn’t too OOC.


End file.
